almost a charivari

View from a Rhino House: “ars longa, vita brevis”

Those crazy amateur literary critics & vodka lovers are at it again in Russia where a few months ago, after an argument over the theories of 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant ended with someone being shot in a grocery store, a man has been stabbed to death in a dispute over the relative merits of prose & poetry.

A retired schoolteacher in the village of Irbit, in the Sverdlovsk region, killed his friend after a drunken argument over which is superior, poetry or prose, investigators said yesterday.

“The literary dispute soon grew into a serious argument, in the course of which the poetry lover killed his opponent with a knife,” the regional branch of the Federal Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Poetry, literature, philosophy, politics; is there anything Russians can agree about when the vodka flows?